A top Nvidia partner says the hiring of Howard Wright—a former NBA player—as Nvidia’s vice president of startup ecosystem is a ‘byproduct of the amount of well-funded [generative AI] startups’ entering the space and reflects the importance of those companies to the AI chip giant.

Nvidia has hired Amazon Web Services executive and former NBA player Howard Wright to lead the AI chip giant’s business with a sprawling network of startups.

Wright announced on LinkedIn Sunday that he is joining Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia as vice president of startup ecosystem after serving as vice president and global head of startups at AWS for more than two years.

[Related: Forrest Norrod On How AMD Is Fighting Nvidia With ‘Significant’ AI Investments]

“This isn’t just another career move; it’s a dream come true,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Nvidia is at the heart of the next Industrial Revolution, and the commitment to innovation and excellence is inspiring. I’m honored to join a team that’s shaping the future of technology.”

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment. Wright didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As global head of startups at AWS, Wright oversaw an organization that was “dedicated to helping startups to create, build and grow on” the company’s cloud platform, according to a biography on the cloud service giant’s website.

Wright was previously CEO and president of C360 Technologies, a Wexford, Pa.-based startup developing computer vision-based solutions for enabling sports broadcasters to create immersive experiences. It was acquired by live entertainment tech vendor Cosm in 2023.

He was formerly vice president of business development at Intel Capital, Intel’s venture capital arm, and spent 14 years before that at Qualcomm.

Wright entered the tech world after playing basketball professionally, which included stints playing for the Atlanta Hawks, Orlando Magic and Dallas Mavericks in the NBA.

“More than anything else, that experience connected the dots for me between maniacal focus, dedication, devotion, planning my days, months and years to a very specific goal, and then achieving that goals,” Wright said of his NBA experience in a 2021 Microsoft blog post.

What Wright’s Hiring Says About Nvidia’s Focus On Startups

Startups have been key to Nvidia’s success in the AI computing space over the past several years, developing new applications using its GPUs and then driving demand for such chips and inspiring further development when those applications gain traction. Such activities are often associated with sales of server platforms developed by Nvidia and have increasingly included other products in its portfolio, including network chips and software.

The most famous example is likely OpenAI, which rose to tech stardom in 2022 after training its GPT-3 large language model using Nvidia GPUs and then using that model to power ChatGPT. An avalanche of generative AI development has followed ever since, allowing Nvidia to more than double its revenue last year, with sales growth expected to continue in 2024.

The main way Nvidia works with startups is through its Inception program, which counts more than 19,000 startups as members and provides various benefits, including free credits for AI courses and workshops as well as preferred pricing on select products and cloud credits for GPU compute through partners, according to the company’s website.

An executive at a top Nvidia system integration partner told CRN that he considers Inception the “gold standard for how to foster a startup ecosystem” and said the hiring of someone like Wright is a “byproduct of the amount of well-funded startups that are starting in the space.”

“As more and more funding has come into the space, especially around generative [AI], in the last 18 months, it’s even more important for them to focus on this,” said Andy Lin, CTO at Houston-based Mark III Systems, a recipient of this year’s Nvidia Partner Network awards.

Lin said startup activity could continue to accelerate thanks to the recent launch of Nvidia Inference Microservices, or NIM for short, which are meant to help speed up generative AI development by packaging AI models with software building blocks such as Nvidia Triton Inference Server into optimized containers that can be integrated into applications.

“The connection between that and startups is that NIMs are going to significantly simplify inferencing the AI models, because it just exposes APIs as opposed to forcing companies and teams to train a model, package the model and then attach it to an app to be used,” he said.